I Am the Teddy Bear
Phantom’s left arm was sheared clean off. All that remained was a ragged stump of upper arm, and from the wound blood poured freely once more, its binding force broken.
“Ah… a grown man can’t go crying just because he got hit, can he?”
Phantom ignored Silvester’s demand and answered with Beast Double. But Silvester was already gone. He streaked through the wind and rain, landing hard on a building.
A deep, resonant thrum rose from the tattoos etched into his flesh. Magic circles completed by geometric sorcery screamed. Those seals were Silvester’s own restraints; if they were shrieking like this, it meant the other side was fighting with everything it had as well.
“Ah!”
A high-frequency engine roar cut through the storm as a passenger car came barreling in. Even with the drains clogged and the road flooded, the vehicle tore through the water as if it thought itself a Land Rover, spraying sheets of spray in its madness.
“Hmph!”
Silvester raised the Barrett and fired straight at it. The car that had been thrashing up white water took the round clean through the engine and died in a single shot. The Black man inside, however, flowed out of the wreck with liquid grace and stuck himself to the wall of a nearby building.
“Jesus! If that had been my car I’d be screwed!”
The Black man tossed out the careless remark and looked back at the stopped vehicle.
Then the sound of wind sliced in from behind him. He ducked and rolled across the water. Silvester was already there, sabre sweeping through the space he had just vacated.
“Whoa! It’s the Jinma hunter!”
Rat Gunip grumbled and lifted a foot. Silvester’s sabre sank into the thick sole of a size-320 walker boot. Had it been the claymore he used before, the entire leg would have gone flying; this flexible sabre merely bent and sliced only the tread as it passed.
“Hm?”
“Fire!”
Rat rolled across the ground and flung a grenade. Ordinary grenades kill with blast and shrapnel, not by being thrown like a shot put meant to smash someone flat. Rat’s throw, however, was pure bullet. Of course Silvester was no fool who would simply take it. He moved his head the barest fraction and let it sail past.
That was the moment Beast Double spat fire. Silvester snapped the Barrett up to block, but the rifle shattered and the impact hurled him sideways.
“Gah—!”
His mouth flew open; the air that had been in his lungs exploded out of him. Silvester’s blood and flesh sprayed across the road and the wall, painting everything a raw, vivid red.
He had been wearing decent body armor, yet there was simply no stopping a monster of a gun like Beast Double. The only mercy was that the round had been a high-penetration ceramic load rather than an explosive one—something like an arrow of aluminum-oxide ceramic seated inside a cartridge case. The bullet punched through Silvester’s arm, through his torso, and out the other arm, boring a clean tunnel through him.
Danger!
For a heartbeat his entire nervous system blazed with pain and every bodily function locked. Even Father Silvester would have died instantly if struck again in that window. Phantom, however, chose flight over the finishing blow and launched himself clear of the fight.
“Jesus!”
A perfect chance to kill Phantom, ruined by some random Black vampire nobody who had come out of nowhere—he had let the big catch slip away! Silvester scanned the surroundings for the Black vampire, but the man had already vanished without a trace.
Then a ground-shaking detonation rolled through the rain. The direction of Se-gun’s position. A booby trap going off? That meant Juyda had gone that way.
To make a mistake like this…
Driving a vampire into a booby trap was work Silvester himself was supposed to handle. No matter that Juyda could run on two legs at over a hundred twenty kilometers an hour—if the creature had simply walked into Se-gun’s position and caused an accident, the fault for endangering Se-gun’s life lay with Silvester for botching the drive.
Se-gun injected vampire blood near the wound with a stim pack, then forced himself to his feet. Inside the storm nothing was visible. But had the bombs even worked against a Jinma?
“What the hell was that noise?!”
Startled voices rose from far away. Damn it—believing in Tetra Anax’s mind control while actively fighting vampires had always been absurd. How foolish and ugly it was to place trust in the very powers of one’s enemies. But Se-gun had no leisure for such thoughts now. The opponent was a Jinma. If he managed to kill a Jinma, it would be a tremendous honor for a human destined to die. But honor?
“Kh…!”
The thought had only flickered through his mind for an instant, yet Se-gun could not forgive himself for it. Honor in killing a vampire? That was never what he fought for!
“Tch!”
Self-contempt boiled up inside him. The afterimages of the blast cleared, and there stood Juyda, covered in wounds. It had worked! Even a Jinma’s defenses could not casually shrug off a C-4 shockwave and the steel bearings riding that storm. On top of that, Juyda had already burned through a large portion of his binding force trading blows with Silvester and Phantom.
“Ah…”
Juyda did not fall. His body was so shredded that holes opened all the way through his back, yet the creature still would not go down. He only swayed as though he might topple at any second. Entranced by the sight, Se-gun rose and lifted the USAS-12.
…
Perhaps he really could kill a Jinma. He sidestepped, took Juyda’s back, and leveled the shotgun from there.
“Get down!”
A voice rang out. Whose, he did not know, but Se-gun dropped on pure reflex. That single instant saved him.
“Ooooooh!”
The arm that had been hanging from Juyda’s shoulder moved. More accurately, an arm that had been embedded in his body tore free. And from his back emerged a long-haired, beautiful woman who was clearly the arm’s original owner. Cascading hair, impossibly graceful curves, breasts that seemed ready to spill over—yet the most shocking thing of all was that she had no eyes on either side of her face, only a single uncanny eye set in the center of her brow.
Of course, something else climbing out of a vampire’s body was already astonishing enough.
“Kyaaaaaaaaaaa!”
A wail that seemed to summon death and calamity itself tore through the air. Se-gun had ducked at the warning, yet the darkness the woman spat still scorched his skin and punched clean through his shoulder.
“Ah!”
In that moment Se-gun felt his mind snap razor-sharp. He had vampire blood circulating through his body. A puncture wound with so little surface area to regenerate should have closed almost at once—but this was different. From the wound an ice-cold chill began flooding through him down to the marrow.
“Kh…!”
Death traveled along his veins. Something cold as a slab of ice invaded every part of him and finally reached his heart. Se-gun felt the world go black and collapsed forward.
Ah… so this is how I die…
Wind howled mercilessly in his ears. Freezing rain, and a darkness colder still, gnawed at him. Yeah… dying like this might not be so bad. Se-gun closed his eyes with that thought.
Yet even with his eyes shut, the images rising from the bottoms of his sockets would not fade. The closer his body drifted toward death and the more its functions failed, the clearer and more vivid those images became.
Se-gun walked once more into the house of his childhood. Nothing had changed. The tragedy played out exactly the same. The dog he had raised, Jeanne d’Arc, lunged at him; his family lay dead; the vampire still waited for him. And when he saw it…
There was a version of himself whispering to run.
A self that told him to abandon his family and save only his own life.
…
But even that was ending. A life that held nothing but pain would receive a fitting full stop. Juyda lifted that enormous zweihander and walked slowly toward Se-gun.
Thud!
A dull impact sounded, and in the same instant Se-gun’s body was hauled upright.
“Hey. You can’t close your eyes yet, friend.”
Sarhyuk grinned as he pulled Se-gun to his feet. In the wind and rain the green light faintly glowing from him looked exactly like a predator’s. Se-gun slowly raised his head and glared.
“Useless meddling!”
Se-gun clenched his teeth in front of the worst enemy he might hate even more than vampires. The cold had grown so extreme that simply clinging to consciousness was already his limit. His vision flickered.
“Guys like you who say it’s fine to die right now—I have a habit of keeping them alive.”
Sarhyuk drawled the words and looked toward Juyda. This was a vampire everyone had always known would end up like this one day, yet left in his present state the thing was pure trash no matter where you put it. He had sucked down so much blood from completely different bloodlines that his lineage purity had plummeted.
No matter how many vampires he hunted and ate, purifying power still required human blood. You could only push concentration so far by dosing pure dragon essence alone. You needed to administer it together with a medium and then reduce it. In other words, a “righteous” vampire who ate only vampires was a dream that could never exist. Turning a blind eye to that reality had produced this. And the woman sealed into his back…
“Well, whatever. This is a freebie. Getting a Jinma for nothing.”
He drew a knife from his coat and checked the battery inside. The blade was designed to dump a high-voltage current like a stun gun the instant it was driven into a target, frying the nerves and causing instant death. That applied when the target was human, of course, but even against a vampire it could reliably rob the body of function.
Through the gale Juyda walked slowly forward. The “woman” bound to his back sobbed like a ghost, weaving her voice into the wind. Even with those grotesque eyes so unlike a human’s, her overall image was devastatingly erotic. Sarhyuk had left fear behind in his mother’s womb, yet even to him Juyda was terror itself.
“But we’ll never know which is longer until we measure them!”
His body felt fear; his mind did not. With a spirit and soul already shattered, he spurred himself on with a passion close to religious fervor and charged Juyda.
Juyda raised his sword, but compared to the lightning speed he had shown until now the reaction was sluggish. Sarhyuk stayed low, sliding in a wide circle that brought him around to Juyda’s flank. His footwork was so fast that a semicircle of spray rose from the water streaming across the pavement.
“What the hell! You’re weak!”
Sarhyuk stabbed the knife into Juyda. It was a weapon that would certainly deal real damage even to a Jinma if it connected. Of course landing a hit would not be the end of the world, but a vampire allowing a human to strike him would be a massive humiliation. Juyda merely stared expressionlessly at the knife and slowly wound his sword around it, intending to knock it aside. Sarhyuk’s thrust was far faster.
“Urgh!”
In that instant the woman-form freed from Juyda’s back moved her hand and seized Sarhyuk’s wrist. A bizarre sound—exactly like a pigeon being crushed under a dump truck—rang out, and Sarhyuk’s arm turned to pulp. Caught only once, the bones of his forearm were completely pulverized and mixed with the meat.
“Kh!”
Then the black blade came for him. An attack launched at the throat of an opponent whose arm had been seized and whose freedom stolen was far too calm and slow. Why deliver a potentially fatal strike so half-heartedly?
KRA-KOOM!
Thunderclouds flashed, scattering light and shadow. Sarhyuk leapt backward and barely cleared the black sword, then drew a Colt Python .357 from his coat with his remaining hand. The right arm that had held the knife was completely crushed from wrist to hand and dangled uselessly. When the situation turned lethal he had deliberately smashed his own arm in order to tear free of that grip.
Having shaken off a vampire’s hand, ending up merely crushed was lucky. The worst case could have been the arm torn clean off. The present state was barely any better than severed, though…
“You son of a bitch! I’m going to eat every last scrap of you so not even a bone is left!”
With only his left arm he still fired with perfect accuracy. Juyda raised one arm and casually blocked the bullets while walking toward Sarhyuk. It looked like ordinary gunfire would never beat this vampire. Then a green light flared in Sarhyuk’s eyes.
“Ah… good! Real good! Let’s go all out! Let’s see who wins!”
The shout had barely ended when Sarhyuk’s face and entire body began to transform at terrifying speed. Arms and legs thickened beyond belief; clothes shredded away; the torso grew so massive it recalled a tank. Hair erupted across every inch of him… and the form that emerged was a gigantic bear. The instant the change finished, Sarhyuk swung a forepaw at Juyda with monstrous power.
CLANG!
Juyda caught the blow on the black sword, but the difference in mass was absolute. His feet left the ground and he was hurled clean across a four-lane road into the building opposite. Sarhyuk, apparently delighted, struck a pose and howled.
“I am the Teddy Bear! The children’s friend who destroys vampires!”
…
Se-gun stared blankly, then snorted a laugh. What a ridiculous lunatic. Still, the fact that Sarhyuk was a werebear came as a mild surprise. Weren’t most of those transforming humans usually wolves? Wolfman or bearman, though, one thing was certain: he was a monster on par with a vampire.
But Juyda was not the sort of creature who would fall to a single trashy blow from a trashy teddy bear. He kicked off the opposite building and came hurtling back at terrifying speed.
BANG! BANG!
Beast spat fire as he ran. Yet Sarhyuk, with agility unbefitting a bear, dodged the shots and slammed himself through the shutter of the neighboring building.
CLATTER-CLANG!
Every shutter hanging on the structure rattled and swayed as Sarhyuk dove inside. For a werebear whose raw strength far outstripped a vampire’s, using confined space to fight was clearly the smart move. Juyda, however, wrapped darkness around his body into a vast whirlpool and once more swung the black sword.
SSSSHHHK!
As the black blade carved through the vortex, eight serpents of pure darkness burst forth and lunged toward the building. Calling them snakes was almost generous—each was thick as a man’s torso and more than fifteen meters long, their nightmarish forms the stuff of pure horror.